Take control of your schedule with a modern calendar experience for Outlook.com

Today, we’re releasing a new, modern calendar experience for Outlook.com. The Outlook.com calendar has been entirely redesigned with a modern, intuitive interface that puts you in control of your schedule. Our calendar service is faster than ever, helps you focus on the events and appointments and tasks you’ve added, and lets you take your calendar with you on any device. The new Outlook.com calendar is rolling out now and will be available around the world this week at https://calendar.live.com/.

A fresh and intuitive design

The new, modern design of Outlook.com, along with many of Microsoft’s other products, optimizes “content over chrome,” which, in the case of calendar, means your events and appointments are the primary focus.

We also made navigating and getting info into your calendar faster than ever. You can add or edit events with a single click, enter an event by simply dragging your mouse across the time or date range you need, add tasks without opening a new page, and jump to a particular day simply by clicking the date.

Another key part of our design philosophy is to ensure that you have a consistent experience that adds up to more than just the individual parts. You’ll see this in how the new Calendar fits naturally into the same family with your inbox, address book and SkyDrive:

Across your modern smartphones and tablets

Of course today’s calendar isn’t about the web alone–it has to work amazingly well across your mobile devices. Outlook.com uses Exchange ActiveSync to sync your mail, calendar, and address book on your smartphone, tablet, in the new Outlook 2013 and with the Mail, Calendar and People apps on your new PC or tablet running Windows 8. You can also use the Outlook connector to integrate your calendar with previous versions of the Outlook desktop software. Connecting your calendar to your mobile device is easy.

Connected to what you care about

You can connect your Microsoft account to services like Skype, LinkedIn, and Facebook to see your friends’ birthdays added to the calendar automatically from those services. Your calendar also shows you up-to-date weather forecasts for many regions, and holidays for a growing list of regions. You can also import calendars (.ics files) or subscribe to public calendars from other services. iCalShare gives you thousands of holiday, sports, and other calendars that you can subscribe to with just a click. Or, try exporting a Google calendar, and then import it into your Outlook.com Calendar by clicking the Import link in the header.

You’re in control of sharing with friends and family

We prioritize your privacy and so of course, your calendar is private by default. But we set out to make it as easy as possible to share your calendar with others. All you have to do is click the “Share” menu in the header. When you share a calendar, other people can access the calendar, but as the owner, you determine who can edit and add events. You can set it up in just a few clicks.

You can either privately share the calendar with specific people (by entering their email address) or you can click “Get a link” and then email or post that link anywhere you want. You can also subscribe to change notifications on a shared calendar. So if one parent adds or changes an event–a family dinner, soccer game, doctor’s appointment, date night–you can make sure the whole family gets notified by email. And, you can have as many shared calendars as you like.

Get started today

Whether you’re already using Outlook.com for your email or you’re just looking for a new, modern calendar, you can get started with any email address at Outlook.com Calendar as soon as your account is upgraded.

Join the conversation

Microsoft, you are SO close to winning me over from Google. However, I need this stuff to work on my Mac. Does the new calendar support CalDAV so I can use it with the OSX Calendar application? I can’t use EAS on my Mac Ditto for IMAP for mail and CardDAV for contacts. If you can solve this problem, I’ll ditch Google tomorrow! I am already digging SkyDrive and Windows Phone, why not make me a happy Outlook.com customer as well? Please keep in mind I’d be happy to pay a few $$$ a month to have access by means of these standard interfaces.

Microsoft is trying to reposition themselves as a company that offers great services for multiple platforms. This is a key way to achieve that vision. It is also a smart thing to do as the computing landscape becomes more diverse.

If you subscribe to the calendar on Outlook Calendar it should appear on your Windows Phone automatically (unless you’re using the first release of the Windows Phone 7 OS–if so, upgrade your phone’s OS).

Words cannot express…looks like this long overdue refresh is about to become reality, and it’s beautiful. I’m looking forward to trying it out. Thanks for your hard work.

One "nice-to-have" I’d like to see is an option to sync my Outlook.com calendar with another calendar (in my case, my Exchange-based work calendar). For security reasons, I can’t hit it externally, but I could use the now-deprecated Google Calendar Sync to push my work appointments there and then pull them into my Windows Phone. It’d be great to have that kind of functionality restored using the Outlook.com Calendar.

Hello David,
Have you improved the ability for people to add public calendars from around the web to their Outlook calendar? Put more simply, will people be able to put a "Add to Outlook calendar" button alongside their "Add to Google Calendar" button?

With all respect for the work you guys are doing on this, could I make one suggestion: when creating a new event, the dropdown menu for time displays the 10 half-hour intervals before the user-set start time for the day (8 or 9 am or whatever). It would be great if this could be reversed to show the 10 intervals AFTER the start time – I don’t expect that most people have appointments at 4am, after all. I think it’s a small thing that would make a big difference.

One other comment. I just deleted an item using the new calendar interface and was asked to confirm the deletion. I guess its a good thing that we’re asked to confirm however I prefer the way SkyDrive does it where you get the opportunity to undo the deletion if you clicked the delete button accidentally. I understand that SkyDrive has a recycle bin so perhaps its easier for them but nonetheless, please can you make calendar work the same way?

Um I tried to sign in and it deleted my comment I guess, so here’s take 2:

The one KILLER feature that Google Calendar has that Outlook does not, is the ability to quickly add sports team calendars. With calendar.google, I can quickly add my favorite NFL, MBA, NCAA etc games, and it even tells me what TV channel the game will be on. I know we track this information in the Windows 8 sports app, so is there any chance we can get these additional public calendars on outlook? It’s one of the few barriers preventing me from switching.

Yeah the Google cal option is easy but honestly I have found it to be just as easy to add my favorite NHL team’s calendar to my Outlook.com, fka live.com. The team posts the official calendar and I download the ICS file and use the subscribe feature to add that calendar to my set of calendars.

This sounds great, but I won’t be able to use it, unfortunately. I just can’t believe it is still impossible to sync Outlook for mac with Outlook.com. I have been doing this for years on my windows machine, but I still have to check Outlook.com manually for e-mail and can’t access my Outlook calendars on Outlook.com, let alone access them with my windows phone.

They either need to add EAS support for OSX, or even better, offer IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV support so you can use any mail, calendaring, and contacts applications that you want. Keep pushing Microsoft to do the right thing here!

I love the new calendar – been waiting a long time for the update. Thank you! In looking at it today, I noticed that I can update the time of an appointment, but I cannot update the location. In order to edit the location, I must first click "view details." From there, I can add the location, but the "save" button remains greyed out and will not let me save the changes. Is anyone else finding this to be the case?

Not impressed with this update at all. Being able to print a schedule from the calendar with all details was a very important use for us. This has now been removed. Even printing is a real pain in the neck. The thumbnail view of the current month has been removed. This means you now cave to click on a menu just to see what a week next Thursdays date is, & there is no key to show what your calendar colours mean. This results in other people who use the calendar having to click on another menu to see the key.
Oooooh it looks really nice. Big chuffing deal! They’ve stripped out useful & essential features. If I can find anyway to export my calendars we will be switching to Google Calendar as this has the useful & important features the Microsoft have just thrown out.

Is it possible to change the default duration of new calendar appointments from 1 hour to 30 minutes? Also — have the colors become ‘harsher’ on the new calendar? Seems the old calendar utilized more ‘muted’ colors, which I personally preferred.

"We look forward to hearing what you think."
Really? You published this 2 days ago. There are 45 comments at the time of writing and you haven’t responded to any of them! Doesn’t really support your assertion that you want to hear our feedback.

Love the revamp. I’ve been eagerly awaiting for it’s arrival for a while. I do have a few suggestions.
1. A dedicated "Today" button to quickly return to the current month if you have scrolled ahead or behind a few months. Right now the easiest way to click the month and then click today, two clicks for a common and simple task.
2. Replace the delete confirmation with the ability to "undo". There is already a nice popup when you create an event to view the details, reuse this to allow undo after something is deleted.
3. Days in the past should be dimmed or some other method of visually "deactivating" them. I created a google chrome extension that does it for google calendar and could do the same here, but it would be nice if it was integrated and worked on all browsers.
4. Small but fairly simple. The favicon in google calendar changes to show the current date. Not hugely useful, but a nice feature.
5. Allow the user to change the color of the interface like Outlook.com.

That’s my 2 cents for now. May have some more after using it a little longer.

@Andrea: With the massive shift to users using mobile devices to access and sync their calendars on the go, we’ve decided not to enable printing from the web interface. We’ll watch the feedback and decide if that’s something we want to add back.

David — you removed printing from the Calendar app because of the shift to mobile devices and calendar synchronization? I have difficulty following that logic. What of the many individuals (and businesses) that use your products on laptop / desktop systems (yes, we still exist), and still require printed schedules for them or their staff? Is it really such a chore to keep printing enabled for this app? Makes me wonder if Outlook.com isn’t a glorified trojan horse, baiting people to try a "free" product and then gradually downgrade or disable features in the hopes of luring them to a "paid" product, such as Office 365.

David – This is crazy! People need to print for a variety of reasons. To take away this functionality diminishes the usefulness of your product. I am a Mom to two gradeschool age children. They do not have email accounts or thier own devices and will not have these things for many years. I keep all of thier assignments, activities, appointments, etc in my calendar and I share it with my husband. I print out the calendar for the kids to see what is coming up. If I can’t print my outlook.com calendar in an easy to read and eye pleasing way, then I will have to duplicate it in another form for my kids to see. That is a lot of extra work for me. And frankly I do not have the time.

I have been a loyal and valued Microsoft PC, Windows Phone, Surface, even the Zune customer for years. I’m the customer you want to keep happy. The decision to remove printing from the calendar feature makes me believe that Microsoft really doesn’t have a good understanding of who thier customers are. I am sitting here shaking my head thinking that if I have to recreate a hard copy of my calendar that I should just give up on Microsoft. I don’t want to. But if Microsoft can’t fix this quickly, I just might have to.

This is a crazy decision, David. Even for those of us who do use mobile devices "access and sync their calendars on the go", it is still incredibly useful to be able to print calendars in order to plan and see events offline, reconcile different calendars. Why remove such a useful feature?

– I can’t open my calendar appointments to edit or delete them. I’ve tried double-clicking, which works intermittently, and I’ve tried right-clicking and selecting Open, which doesn’t work at all.
– When I try to send an invitation to someone, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I get a "We can’t do this right now. Try again later." message. Just like in People, sometimes when I update a contact’s information and try to save it, I get a "Try again later" message. The whole point of a productivity tool is I do it now so I don’t have to remember to do it later. So frustrating.

Also, Jane, on the Meeting Invite. Can you send me a mail to my Microsoft account? davidden is my alias. I want to understand what your email address is, what browser you are using and some other details.

Hi,
When using Windows Live Mail, you can create a new Rendez-Vous by clicking right on a mail .. the Rendez-Vous is filled with your mail content and subject and you keep the link with the mail in the calendar… is it possible with Outlook 2013 ?

Office 2013 and especially Outlook 2013 is useless with Google account, you can’t get proper sync working at all. I was trying to "downgrade" my whole office to 2010, because it works, but of course MS wants more money of it.
When I purchased office 2013 I thought that MS learnt their lesson from Vista, but no, office 2013 is very low quality software and change to 2010 not possible. Then they wonder, why people are not buying new software. What a fantastic company.
In our office I will be the last one who is buying these POSs

Yes and no. Google pulled the support not long ago. They decided only paying customers could sync their google calendar to many things now, through imap. Some large businesses and universities still have support, but there is no option for the average person. There are workarounds, though, but you’ll need to look them up as I just went ahead and swapped to outlook.com as soon as google stopped their imap sync support.

what happened to the ability to publically share a calendar and being able to embed it using an iframe into a website? I’m quite sure that many users were using this functionality for smaller sportclubs or alike. However with the change to the new Outlook design, this functionality was removed. Any Workaround or alternative solution available? I still can’t believe that Microsoft is leaving this area as an opportunity for Google where such functionality is still available.

When you setup your account in 2013, pick the manual setup, and just make sure to pick the "outlook.com or exchange active sync", choice. Enter your info, and tell it to sync the contacts and calendar. It works very well.

For 2010 you had to use a little plugin to sync it. 2013 will do it automatically, but you want to make sure that you’re setting it up as an EAS account (like a business would).

I just spent an hour with my calendar. It’s not "fresh". It’s annoying. It’s not "intuitive." It’s difficult to use. There’s no personalization available at all. I get to pick colors for events, but not for the calendar itself? It just stays purple? Why can’t I print? That was THE most useful function, and it’s gone. Also, everything is really, really big. Doesn’t make sense to make the calendar squares huge. It doesn’t need to be big…just legible. Big squares and tiny writing – what’s the point? You don’t have IMAP yet, so syncing isn’t possible for me. This calendar is pretty useless to me. Sounds like a downgrade to me. I miss Hotmail more and more each day. Probably why I’m spending more time with Gmail.